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Twitter on Thursday labeled a tweet from Russian state media outlet RT (formerly Russia Today) that included a video implying widespread voter fraud is plaguing, and potentially delegitimizing, the U.S. election.Why it matters: It's the first time Twitter has labeled RT's account with a civic integrity label, or a designation used to highlight efforts to manipulate or interfere in elections or other civic processes.What they're saying: "We placed a label on the Tweet you referenced for making potentially misleading claims that could undermine confidence in the election, and to offer more context for anyone who may see the Tweet," a Twitter spokesperson said. "This action is in line with our updated Civic Integrity Policy."Earlier this month, Twitter said it would expand the number of labels it put on tweets to help curb the spread of misinformation surrounding the U.S. election. The big picture: Intelligence officials have warned that Russia is meddling in the U.S. election, and using strategic disinformation campaigns as a weapon to do so. On Thursday, former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told CBS News' Norah O'Donnell that the intelligence community has "full confidence that the Russians are going after our elections," despite the fact that President Trump has disputed that claim.Be smart: Russia will often deploy disinformation using its state-backed media accounts, with hopes that other domestic media outlets will pick it up. Twitter began labeling state-affiliated media accounts in August, which is why the RT account also features a label that says it's "Russia state-affiliated media."The marked tweet, featured below, cannot be shared or commented on.

Rapper Lil Wayne made a big splash on Twitter after he revealed that he met with President Trump, sharing a friendly photo the two of them took together. "Just had a great meeting with @realdonaldtrump @potus besides what he’s done so far with criminal reform, the platinum plan is going to give the community real ownership. He listened to what we had to say today and assured he will and can get it done," Lil Wayne said. The Platnum Plan is an economic plan rolled out by the Trump campaign aiming to help Black Americans. 50 CENT DOUBLES DOWN ON OPPOSITION TO JOE BIDEN'S TAX PLAN: 'I DON'T WANT TO BE 20CENT'Lil Wayne, born Dwayne Michael Carter Jr., also posted a photo of himself with the president from the meeting that took place on Thursday in Miami, giving a thumbs up to the camera.The tweet sparked praise among conservatives and condemnation from liberals. "There is a difference between pandering and supporting. Democrats say you're not black enough (or gay enough, Muslim enough, female enough) if you support Republicans. They expect the vote.@realDonaldTrump and Republicans won't pander here. That's why there have been in-roads," radio host Jason Rantz tweeted. ICE CUBE DEFENDS WORKING WITH TRUMP CAMPAIGN ON 'PLATINUM PLAN' FOR BLACK AMERICANS"It’s sickening how Lil Wayne and so many rappers I grew up with are selling out to white supremacy," author Frederick Joseph wrote. "All the rappers that have endorsed Trump should start a pac and call it 2 PAC," the Daily Caller's Greg Price quipped. "If you think Donald Trump cares about the Black community beyond their votes next week, you are deluding yourself -- and doing a con man's job for him," Perez Hilton reacted.The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to Fox News' request for comment, Trump Campaign Communications Director Tim Murtaugh tweeted "This is a BIG deal."It…

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai testified before the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday about their content moderation practices, in a hearing that Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, promoted like a boxing match; indeed, the event was a circus.Instead of holding the tech titans accountable for their broad decisions, showing any command of how these platforms are reshaping all aspects of everyday life for Americans, or even sticking to the topic at hand, this hearing — like other Republican-led tech hearings in the Trump era — devolved into a banal session of complaining about the alleged suppression of specific conservatives and conservative posts on social media.These stories of alleged suppression tend to be simply anecdotal because the facts simply don’t back up sweeping assertions. We at Media Matters have done study after study after study after study showing that conservative content on Facebook receives significantly greater engagement than other content. The New York Times’ Kevin Roose has shown that the top-performing link posts on U.S. Facebook pages are dominated by conservatives like President Donald Trump, conservative podcaster and Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro and Fox News contributor and conservative news aggregator Dan Bongino.In fact, the examples that conservatives give of alleged censorship are usually just examples of individuals breaking the rules or not knowing how social media works.Take the hearing's focus on the New York Post’s temporary ban from Twitter, which has become a cause célèbre in recent days in right-wing circles. Contrary to widespread belief on the right, Twitter did not take action because it disagrees with the paper’s content, but rather because an article shared by the Post’s Twitter account contained personal contact information, in violation of Twitter's explicit rules, and the company refused to remove the tweets. Twitter took similar action…

By Patrick Tucker Technology Editor October 29, 2020 07:03 PM ET Infowar 2020 Elections Twitter bots are nearly twice as likely to amplify right-wing content than are humans, a new paper finds, shedding light on how these largely automated social media personas can shape public opinion.About 13 percent of all Twitter users that retweeted or engaged in conspiracy theories were bots, according to researchers from the University of Southern California who looked at more than 240 million election-related tweets from June 20 to Sept. 9. The USC team analyzed the tweets using Botometer,an online tool developed at Indiana University, which analyzes a Twitter account’s behavior to score the probability of the probability that the account is a bot. The paper, published this week in the online journal First Monday, shows that right-wing bots outnumber left-wing bots roughly two-to-one. So how many Twitter users talking about politics are bots? Only about 5 percent, but they drive a lot of conversation. “We see a backdrop of approximately 5% bots in right-and-left leaning discussions, and 10-15% bots associated with conspiracy groups that are responsible for as much as 20% of volume of engagement with hyperpartisan news websites,” said the study’s lead author, Emilio Ferrara, who is an associate professor of Communication and Computer Science at USC’s  Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.Ferrara’s team found that both right-wing and left-wing humans who use Twitter exist largely in filter bubbles where they are much more likely to see and spread content from and to their chosen affiliated group, confirmed their  pre-existing convictions and beliefs. “Our analysis shows that 35 percent of retweets are left-leaning humans retweeting other left-leaning humans; 53 percent of retweets are right-leaning humans retweeting other right-leaning humans,” they write.By examining banned users, the researchers found indications that “Ghana and Nigerian information operations” were targeting people…

A little more than a year ago, China had almost no diplomatic presence on Twitter. A handful of accounts, many representing far-flung diplomatic outposts, operated without apparent coordination or direction from Beijing. Today, the work of Chinese diplomats on Twitter looks very different: More than 170 of them bicker with Western powers, promote conspiracies about the coronavirus, and troll Americans on issues of race. The quadrupling in the past year and a half of China’s diplomatic presence on a site blocked within China suggests that turning to Western platforms to influence the information environment beyond China’s borders is no longer an afterthought but a priority. In pursuing increasingly assertive tactics to shape how China is perceived online, Beijing has borrowed elements of Russia’s playbook. China’s “wolf warrior” diplomats—a phrase that comes from a jingoistic Chinese film franchise and refers to a new approach among the Chinese diplomatic corps to more aggressively defend their home country online—propagate conflicting conspiracy theories about the origins of the novel coronavirus that are designed to sow chaos and deflect blame. It is using these so-called warriors, together with its sprawling state media apparatus and, at times, covert trolling campaigns, to amplify false theories on social media and in the news. And it is doing all this by leaning on the propaganda outlets run by Moscow, Caracas, and to a lesser extent, Tehran, and the network of contrarian agitators they leverage to promote anti-Western content. But Beijing has also developed several of its own plays. Its diplomats engage with Twitter accounts that bear hallmarks of inauthenticity, underscoring the challenge of generating grassroots support for its campaigns on a platform that is banned at home. It has deployed hashtag campaigns and dedicated social media accounts to flood conversations about its human rights record with positive content. We…

Key Words Published: Oct. 28, 2020 at 5:19 p.m. ET Miles Taylor, former Homeland Security chief of staff, says he wrote the anonymous New York Times op-ed against Trump in 2018

The Twitter logo is seen on a phone Alastair Pike/ AFP via Getty Images Text size A glance at Twitter’s stock chart ahead of Thursday’s third-quarter earnings suggests a company that has done well in 2020, despite the Covid-19 pandemic and the damage wrought to online advertising. Twitter (ticker: TWTR) shares are up roughly 60% this year, and nearly 50% since Barron’s wrote positively about the name in June, after CEO Jack Dorsey’s company began to get more aggressive about its content moderation practices. Unlike several of its rivals, such as Facebook (FB), Pinterest (PINS), and Snap (SNAP), Twitter revenue hasn’t proven as resilient, shrinking 19% during the second quarter, and is expected by sell-side analysts to shrink again by 6.2% in the third quarter. By contrast Facebook’s growth has slowed but continued to grow in the double digits, and Snap grew revenue by about 50% in the third quarter, which it reported last week. Snap’s outsize revenue beat, by more than $100 million, reporting sales of $678.7 million, and the positive commentary that followed has given analysts reason to say that there has been a rebound in the online advertising market. Estimates have become more bullish in the past four weeks: the consensus for adjusted earnings rose by 4.5%, and revenue models advanced 1.1%. Wall Street expects adjusted earnings of 5 cents a share, on revenue of $778.2 million, which suggests sales will fall 5.5% compared with a year ago. Analysts expect a GAAP loss of 10 cents a share. Investors will find out one way or another Thursday, when the company reports its results, this time after the closing bell, which is a departure from the company’s typical premarket release (a tradition that began because it cut a large number of employees as it announced results, and stuck…

October 27, 2020 | 7:47pm Enlarge Image Despite Twitter's best efforts to suppress The Post's stories about Hunter Biden's emails users can now share them. Teresa Kroeger Other outlets continue to verify The Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s efforts to monetize his family connections overseas. Yet Twitter, which sought to suppress our story, continues to bar The Post from the platform — two weeks later. The Post obtained a copy of Hunter Biden’s hard-drive, from a laptop left at a Delaware repair shop in 2019. Reporters found an e-mail in which an executive at Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm that paid Hunter $50,000 a month, thanked Hunter for setting up a Washington meeting with his father, then-Veep Joe Biden. Other e-mails show Hunter negotiating a $10 million-a-year deal with a Chinese firm for “introductions alone.” And he’d hold, besides his own share, a 10 percent stake for “the big guy” in a company set up to do business with the Chinese. The country’s two social-media giants acted immediately after our stories went online, with Twitter locking The Post’s account and a Facebook exec bragging about suppressing the story. Then Tony Bobulinski, Hunter’s former business partner, confirmed not only the e-mails about China, but told The Post that Joe was “the big guy.” Meanwhile, neither Joe Biden nor Hunter Biden has argued the validity of the laptop nor the e-mails; the vice president simply claims the China deal never came to fruition. Receipts show the computer repair shop took in the laptop. Elected officials confirm the laptop was handed over to the FBI. It isn’t a hack. It isn’t Russian disinformation. It’s all true. So the only reason for social media to continue to punish The Post is not because of any “fake news” concerns — it’s because they’re mad about…

Did President Donald Trump place Amish supporters at a rally in Pennsylvania? One Twitter user appears to think so. They claimed that the president hired supporters for his rally on Monday in Lancaster County, a dominantly Amish (and apolitical) community."Trump's campaign should do their homework before hiring their 'supporters,'" one user wrote. They shared an image of the president at the rally with a man in a traditional Amish straw hat and beard, who also appeared to wear earbuds, behind him in clear view."The Amish fellow in the left of this picture is shown wearing earbuds and jacket with a zipper;the Amish shun both. And, wait for it........Amish don't VOTE!" they added.@realDonaldTrump Trump’s campaign should do their homework before hiring their “Supporters”. The Amish fellow in the left of this picture is shown wearing earbuds and jacket with a zipper;the Amish shun both. And, wait for it........Amish don’t VOTE! pic.twitter.com/X9c3XOXtOS— Newton Brock (@NewtonBrock3) October 26, 2020 In a video shared online, Trump mentions having the Pennsylvania Dutch in his crowd and giving a thumbs up. Several Amish men respond by giving him a thumbs up behind him.Listen to this Trump riff on the Amish: "We have Pennsylvania Dutch...They're great people...Pennsylvania Dutch are voting en masse...Hard workers, incredible craftsmen. You've done work for me over the years, I'll tell ya. They can throw up a barn in about two days" #TrumpRally pic.twitter.com/LGEUeg14fh— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) October 26, 2020 "Don't tell anybody, but the Pennsylvania Dutch are voting en masse. They're voting. I heard that the other day," Trump said a rally he held at the Lancaster Airport in Lititz, via Philadelphia Inquirer."They said, 'We work hard. We can't have a man who sleeps all day in the basement," the president added, taking aim at his election rival Vice President Joe Biden....

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